


An Hourglass Reversing

by galfridian



Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fringe Fusion, Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Alternate Universe - MCU Fusion, Alternate Universe - National Treasure Fusion, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Five Time and One Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 18:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3260753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/pseuds/galfridian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five lives Emily and Nolan didn't live and one they did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Hourglass Reversing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weasleytook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/gifts).



> Written for [Lisa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/) as a long overdue birthday gift. Happy belated birthday, Lisa. You're one of the grandest people I've ever known!
> 
> Thank you to [Jessi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sosobriquet/) and [Maura](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fujiidom/) for the beta read.

**1.**

Emily Thorne storms NolCorp on a sweltering August afternoon. Nolan's first assistant manages a weak "may I help" as Emily breezes past her. His second assistant simply steps aside. Emily has donned the corporate uniform, flawless from a couture blazer and designer shoes to her calculated disinterest. To Nolan's staff, she appears perfectly at home, utterly in her element in his million dollar offices. Only he knows better.

Nolan follows her into his office, closing the door behind him with a gentle kick. Her performance is superb – a far cry from the sullen, dark-haired girl he last saw. He doesn't know whether he's more amused or impressed. Emily notices his grin and fixes him with a glare. He adds _fear_ to his list of possible reactions to Emily Thorne.

"Something you need?" he asks, happy to dispense with manners if she is.

"Actually, yes." From her briefcase, she produces a folder. He crosses the room to take it. Inside, he finds scans of maps. "My father believed in you when no one else did. I need you to return that favor."

David Clarke was many things in his life, among them: a devoted father, a generous benefactor, and a treasure hunter. He believed in a story passed down through generations of Clarkes about buried treasure brought to the country by the Founding Fathers. In the last years of his life, he spent all his savings searching for that treasure, and ultimately, he paid for that search with his life.

Nolan sighs, snapping the folder closed. David was a smart man who let a legend ruin his life. "Emily, this is –"

"I don't need to find the treasure, Nolan. It's probably lost forever or spread out across the world by now." She jerks the folder from his grasp. "I just need to prove it existed. I need money."

"Okay," Nolan agrees. David's initial investment in NolCorp belongs to her anyway. "But wherever this goes, I'm coming with you."

 

Where it goes: they break a few laws. Nolan started out as a hacker, so he's less concerned with the law-breaking than he is the reckless way Emily approaches it. "You're going to get us killed," he complains half-heartedly.

"Maybe," Emily agrees, and her grin is as terrifying as her glare.

 

Next thing Nolan knows, he's crawling through someone's tomb in pursuit of treasure. At some point, and he can't pinpoint when, proving that it existed stopped being enough. He follows Emily into a tunnel in a tomb in a church basement, as exhilarated as he is terrified.

The tunnel leads to a narrow corridor and an underground chamber. They descend a set of two hundred year old stairs, while Nolan thinks about zeroes and ones instead of termites and wood rot. When they find nothing but an empty room at the bottom of the stairs, Emily presses forward.

These last few months, he's watched her come alive. Through every discovery, every disappointment, every step, Emily has become more like her father. Better than her father, even. Nolan hates cliches, but if ever there was a human force of nature, Emily Thorne would be it.

 

They find the treasure, of course, and it's just the beginning. She's addicted, and if he's honest, he is, too. They find it all: ghost towns, vanishing islands, sunken treasures. Legends become life.

The Clarke name is restored – and then some – but Emily keeps _Thorne_. "It's us," she says, when he asks. She shrugs, and he follows her into another adventure.

**2.**

"Infinity times infinity," her father whispers, tracing two intersecting symbols in the sand. "Understand?"

She's nine years old: sunburnt, content, and still Amanda Clarke. _Infinity times infinity._ Three words she's heard a million times. Yesterday, they meant _I love you_ , but today…

She can't look away from the linked infinity symbols. "I understand, Daddy."

David Clarke takes his daughter's hand and leads her away from the beach.

 

"But – _how_?" Nolan sputters. He leans against the nearest wall, looking at Emily like she's a ghost. And, well, perhaps she is. "Amanda Clarke killed herself five years ago. I saw – I _buried_ her."

Emily sighs. "Nolan, really, don't you know?" He stares, sinks slowly toward the floor, and she realizes it isn't just fear she's seeing in his eyes. It's grief. She crosses to him and kneels. "There's more than one of everything."

 

"I'm not her," Emily warns him, in the beginning. Whatever happened to his Amanda Clarke, whatever they went through, she's not her. "I'm just here to do what she couldn't."

To his credit, Nolan keeps his distance and doesn't ask questions, however much he wants to. And it's nice, having a partner. Having someone to trust.

She doesn't tell him that her Nolan was implicated alongside her father. She can't tell him that she failed to save him, that her meddling made his life worse before it ended. But he's a genius, so of course, he works that out. "How many times?" he asks one night, watching her cross out faces in a photograph.

"Four," she says. "This is the fifth."

"How many until it's enough?"

That number, she doesn't have.

 

Grayson Manor burns to the ground. CNN plays Victoria's frantic confession over the image. It isn't the ending Emily prefers, but it serves its purpose.

This David Clarke's death wasn't staged. She's relieved. The last David Clarke she met couldn't handle his daughter's death, and right now, she can't face another of her father's ghosts. Instead, Emily sits on the beach with Nolan. She watches the moon rise as he examines the device that lets her travel between parallel worlds.

Nolan turns the machine over and over in his hands. "I designed this? It's a bit…crude."

Emily smiles, because she can't cry; rolls her eyes, because he expects it. "You were on a deadline." The joke tastes like sand on her tongue, and Nolan's laugh is flat.

"You can't predict where it will take you."

"I can't," she agrees.

"Ems, this has to end," he pleads, setting the device aside. "You've cleared four Davids. Just – stay?"

He's looking at her that haunted way again, that mix of fear and grief, and she falls back on: "I'm not her."

This time, his laugh is raw, careless. "No, you're not, but you could still stay. I don't need you to be her."

But Emily remembers: _Standing on this beach with her father's hand on her shoulder, staring a beach just like this one, and waving at a little girl and her father who looked just like them._

"I'm sorry," she whispers. 

She doesn't reach out for him; he doesn't look at her.

She leaves him sitting on the beach, two infinity symbols drawn on the sand next to him.

**3.**

Ambrose Tate III, heir to Tate Pharmaceutical and a fortune built on the backs of the poor and the terminal, draws himself to his feet. "You won't get away with this," he spits at Emily.

"Oh?" Emily says, allowing herself a smile as the FBI bursts through the door. She shrinks back into her chair, pulling her thrift store shawl tight around her shoulders. One of the agents kneels beside her, holding her hand as she whispers a fearful, "What's happening?"

Tate oscillates between confusion and outrage as he's cuffed and read his rights. "No, just wait!" he protests, struggling against his cuffs. "You've got this wrong. I didn't – _They're_ the ones." He nods at Emily and Nolan, but the feds see only the cancer patient and Tate's meek personal assistant.

"Let's go," the lead agent barks, dragging Tate from the room. The rest of the feds follow, leaving them alone in Tate's empty office.

Emily stands, shrugging off the shaw, and crosses to the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the street. Nolan joins her. Below, Tate and the feds emerge. As he's forced into a black SUV, Tate casts a final glance at his office window.

In these moments, Emily is a storm, she's the proverbial unstoppable force, and the fear in Tate's eyes is deserved. But this, this moment of triumph, isn't what floors Nolan. It's what comes before the con, when Emily sits with the grieving, the broken, the cast-aside. _You're suffering under an enormous weight_ , she says. _Let us relieve that burden._

After, however fierce she seems standing over her enemy, Emily looks emptied. These days, she piles the jobs on one after the other – a relentless, punishing pursuit to see the mighty crumble beneath her heel. But it never quenches her thirst, because somewhere, the Graysons still thrive. They're free – _alive_ – and her father is dead.

Emily's fists are tight around the stainless steal rail that borders the office windows. Standing there, staring down at flashing lights, she could be a statue. Some days, Nolan thinks he should fear her as much as he loves her. "Ems," he says gently, coaxing her hands from the rail. She allows it – her shoulders even relax a little – but she doesn't look at him.

"He should be buried," she says. "He should never see sunlight again. But with his lawyers –"

"I know." They've seen it before. They've destroyed his company, and he'll pay for some of his sins, but ultimately, he'll walk free.

"This is why I can't go after the Graysons," she tells him. "What if I succeed? What if I take them down and then – then I don't have it in me anymore? Too many people need us."

Nolan wants to laugh – and almost does – because she needs this, too. They both do. This is who they are now. "You won't stop," he says. "You'll finally feel what they people we've helped have felt. And once you feel that? No, we won't stop."

The flashing lights have disappeared now. The office park has quieted. Another day, another corrupt billionaire. "Okay," Emily agrees. "Let's take them down."

**4.**

She leaves Nolan Ross standing in the Allenwood Juvenile Detention parking lot and doesn't look back. In Zurich, she trades her father's name for a fresh start. _Emily Thorne_ , she scrawls on the form – for the only family she had in juvie. Killed in a car accident a week after leaving Allenwood.

When she returns to America, it's to New York, and she practices what foster care taught her: blend in, keep quiet, don't let your guard down. But she can't ignore the Graysons. Their faces are plastered all over the news, fundraisers and charities, supporting political candidates. She's wasted years believing her father was a murderer, and now he's gone, and these people…

So Emily also practices what juvie taught her: self-destruction. It's a noxious mix, her hatred and regret thrown in bed with her self-defeat, and she drowns in it.

The one morning, she wakes in an unfamiliar room and finds a stranger standing over her. Emily sits, ignoring the dull throb of her hangover migraine, and the woman hands her a cup of tea. "Hello, Amanda," she greets. Emily can't decide if it's the English accent that makes her sound so businesslike or just her personality. "I'm Peggy Carter, and you're probably wondering how I know your name."

"My name isn't Amanda," Emily replies. Peggy smiles at this, which Emily ignores. She glances around, trying to make sense of where she is, trying to decide if there's a weapon nearby if she needs one.

"There isn't," Peggy says. "A weapon, I mean. If that's what you're after. And yes, I know you call yourself Emily Thorne, but that isn't the name your father gave you."

Emily lowers her cup. The tea has helped her head a little, but the hot water might serve her needs better on Peggy's face. "What do you know about my father?"

"I know that he was framed." Peggy stands and crosses the room to open the curtains. She lingers by the window, out of Emily's reach. "I know that you want the people responsible to pay for it. But the Graysons are just a symptom of a greater problem. They're pawns. I'm here to offer you the opportunity to cut this evil down at its source."

She doesn't hesitate, can't wait to tear something apart like the Graysons tore her life apart. "What do you need me to do?"

 

"There's the problem of your name," Peggy says a few weeks later. They're having lunch at a bistro a few blocks from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. These days, Peggy works more from home, but recruiting Emily involves a more hands-on approach. 

"My name?"

"You can't be Amanda Clarke, but you can't be Emily Thorne either. Too easy to trace back to your birth name, not to mention those little kerfuffles with local law enforcement." 

Emily shrugs. "Okay, who should I be then?"

"How about my niece?" Peggy suggests, and Sharon Carter is born.

 

Emily recruits Nolan ten months later. S.H.I.E.L.D. welcomes him, trading their old public face for NolCorp when he buys their building. Tech support improves drastically, much to Emily's relief. Government funding doesn't buy great techies, it seems.

They only talk about the Graysons once, on his first day. "So – HYDRA, huh?" he says, trading her old computer for a NolCorp prototype.

"You're surprised?"

"Few things have made as much sense."

They're a good team, it turns out. He builds gadgets and teaches her how to improvise with technology in the field; she teaches him self-defense. She thinks it'll be weird working with someone who knew her father, but she finds it's easier. Away from work, he calls her _Emily_ and fills in missing pieces of her father's story.

It's the closest she's felt to having someone for years.

 

He designs a new suit for her. "This standard issue ensemble doesn't suit you," he insists. 

"Do I want to know how you got my measurements?" she asks, hoping there's a computer somewhere he hacked.

Emily has to admit, the suit is amazing. Between the gadgets and the way it seems to anticipate her moves, she feels faster, stronger. Nolan grins. "Even Iron Man will be jealous of this," he says. She rolls her eyes at both the notion and his ego.

"I'm not a superhero, Nolan."

"We'll see."

 

The day Nolan almost dies, Emily isn't wearing the suit. But she storms his office just the same, and she cuts down his attackers without a thought just the same, and Nolan laughs. There's blood pooling around his waist as she takes his hand.

"EMTs are on their way," Romanoff says, hovering behind them. Emily glances at her. Natasha looks both impressed at the carnage and a little disappointed to have missed the fun.

Then Nolan's hand slips from hers, and Emily's busy trying to keep his eyes open, and all she's got are the stupid jokes her dad used to tell when she was a kid. "You're terrible at this," Nolan says, and he's got this far away look in his eyes, but he's smiling at her like she's the sun.

"Hey," Emily says, cradling his head in her hands, "why are you looking at me like that?"

Behind her, Romanoff snorts. "He always does, Carter."

"My hero," Nolan jokes, and Emily's heart twists painfully – wonderfully – in her chest.

**5.**

Amanda Clarke walks away.

Everything she owns fits in the bottom of the plastic bag swinging in her left hand. Her father's wooden box is tucked under her right arm. She doesn't look back, doesn't even pause. She stares straight ahead. At Allenwood, she's had her first lessons in making herself unshakeable. She isn't the little girl her father described, and she's definitely not the woman David imagined she'd become. The Graysons stole that, too.

One thing Nolan knows about the Clarkes: when to back down. So he swallows his apologies and drives away.

He keeps an eye on her as much as he can – he owes David that, at least – but after she leaves Zurich with her 49% of NolCorp, she doesn't make it easy. Sometimes, he catches wind of her. Parties, mostly; what he'd expect of an eighteen year old with too much money. Then one day, she disappears from his radar, and all he's left with for years are rumors.

Fifteen years pass between their first meeting and their second.

 

On the morning a monster crawls out of the ocean, Nolan is oceanside in Los Angeles, negotiating the terms of a merger. _So much for that_ , he thinks, when Trespasser destroys the Golden Gate Bridge. He manages to get his helicopter in the air before all non-military air travel is suspended.

In New York, he and the rest of NolCorp watch the five days of devastation that unfold in California, keenly aware that he lives next to an ocean. "It's the end of everything," Melinda – his paranoid but genius analyst – whispers. Melinda is prone to dramatics, but this time, Nolan suspects she's right.

Over the next year, three more Kaiju attack. Between the monsters and the nukes, whole cities are lost. NolCorp dwindles down to a handful of tech geniuses with nothing better to do at the end of the world.

In October, Jasper Schoenfeld calls and asks for his help. His idea to fight the Kaiju without nukes has been approved, and he needs Nolan's help designing the tech. 

Melinda isn't impressed. "Really? Robots?"

"Giant robots, Melinda. _Giant_ robots."

Honestly, Nolan is just relieved to contribute something – there's been too much _nothing_ in his life since Trespasser flattened the west coast.

 

Three years later, the call goes out: the new Los Angeles Shatterdome needs techs. Nolan volunteers. Pan Pacific sends a Ranger to transport him from Anchorage.

When he sees Amanda Clarke standing in front of the helicopter, he laughs. She's blonde now and stands taller. "Emily Thorne," she says when he reaches her. Nolan shakes her hand, speechless for the first time since he saw Brawler Yukon.

In the helicopter, Amanda – _Emily_ , he tells himself – confesses that she volunteered to retrieve him when she saw his name on the transfer list. "Look," she says. "I want to say: I'm sorry about walking away."

Nolan shrugs. She was a kid, angry and hurt. Nothing like the woman sitting across from him. "That was half an apocalypse ago, _Ems_ ," he replies. The corners of her mouth lift slightly, and she turns away from him, staring out the window. Amanda Clarke disappears, and Emily Thorne, Ranger for the Pan Pacific Defenses Corps, takes her place.

 

"Dude, I can't believe _Emily Thorne_ escorted you here!" Rafid Iqbal glances over his shoulder, watches Emily turn a corner and disappear. Rafid heads the Shatterdome's science division, but today, he's Nolan's tour guide. "How did that happen?"

"We knew each other once," Nolan tells him, "in another life. Is she good, then?"

"Good?" Rafid laughs. "Thorne and her co-pilot, Lehmann, are rockstars."

"Oh?"

"You'll see," he assures Nolan. "She donated a fortune to help build this place, too. Come on, I'll show you to your quarters."

 

At first, Nolan seldom sees Emily. He learns his way around the Shatterdome – it's his third, so that's easy enough – and tries to scale the small mountain of work that was waiting for him when he arrived. They pass each other in the halls or at meals, but whatever openness Emily felt on the journey to Los Angeles has passed.

Nolan guesses she just wanted the matter settled before he set foot in the Shatterdome.

 

A Kaiju crawls toward the shoreline three months after Nolan arrives. After Emily and her co-pilot decapitate the monster, their scientists name it Vara.

Before its death, Vara nearly tears their Jaeger apart. Nolan and Rafid watch the Jaeger stagger into the hangar. "Seems like every beast the ocean spits out knows all our tricks," Rafid says, sagging against a nearby wall. "We can't sustain this, can we?"

"No, but we have to," Nolan says.

 

He finds her in the combat room. Nolan has seen hundreds of Rangers train but few with her ferocity. She isn't arrogant: she doesn't fight to feed her ego; she fights to survive.

She notices him straightaway, of course. "What are you doing here?"

"Rumors has it you don't sleep much after a fight. I thought I'd keep you company."

"Don't bother," she says, sliding into another maneuver. He expected this – rumors also told him the only person she talks to is her co-pilot, but since he's been in her head, she doesn't have to. She doesn't look at him when she adds, "unless you want to help. I could use a sparring partner."

He glances down at his own lanky form. "A sparring partner or a punching bag?"

"Whichever," she shrugs. He catches a glimpse of a smile. "Maybe I could teach you a thing or two."

He doesn't know what spurs him to cross the threshold and onto the mat, but he regrets the choice the moment he does. "A thing or two," he agrees. "Probably not much more than that."

"We'll see," she says.

 

That night, after he's bruised and his muscles are screaming, Emily says, "I went back to the Hamptons."

"– what?"

"A year before the first Kaiju attack. I needed to see them again, so I made a generous donation to Victoria's favorite charity and received an invitation to a benefit."

"And then?"

"Nothing. I wanted to tear them apart, but it wasn't what my father wanted."

"Well," Nolan says. "I heard a Kaiju pulled their private jet from the sky and threw it into the ocean."

"Poetic."

"Undeniably."

 

The training sessions become routine. Late nights, an empty combat room, Nolan's body pushed to its limits, and Emily talking. Some nights, she doesn't say much – most nights, in fact. But after battles, she opens up.

"It's the Drift, I think," she tells him. "You're just…opened up. Every time, Lehmann sees my worst memories, and I just…so I come here. Train, try to forget."

He tries not to ask her about that, about how Lehmann must know the truth about her, about how he's kept it a secret. But one night, she's walking him through a series of boxing exercises, and the question spills out.

She pauses, her hands still on his arms, guiding his movements. "He has secrets of his own," she says, after a moment. "We all do."

 

Nolan has learned knowing the technical details of an experience is nothing like living through it. He understood the mechanics of love long before he felt it.

He knows the facts about Drifting, about the Bridge. Two consciousnesses linked together, lives and souls stripped bare for another person.

Science says that the Drift ends when pilots step out of their Jaegers, but Nolan has seen co-pilots train, has seen them move in synch in hallways, has seen the way one flinches at the other's pain.

As the months pass, and he grows stronger and faster, he begins to spar with Emily. He predicts her moves as often as she does his. He wonders if the Drift is anything like this.

 

Lehmann dies in early April. A Kaiju knocks Emily unconscious, shutting down her side of the Jaeger, and crushes Lehmann's side beneath its feet. It's rare for one pilot to die and the other to survive, and when it happens, it's a gut-wrenching sight. 

Emily walks around the Shatterdome like a bird with clipped wings, torn from the person she allowed to become part of her. Torn from her fight.

When they spar, she's brutal. She pushes until he breaks, or until she breaks, and then leaves the combat room without a word.

 

"I need you to be my co-pilot," Emily says. It's a month after Lehmann's death, a month of her watching other Rangers climb into their Jaegers. "Just – just listen, okay? I trained you. I know you can do this."

"Ems –" he protests, dropping his tools.

"We're Drift compatible," she argues. "You can't tell me you don't see that. I know I'm asking you to risk your life, but –"

"I'll do it," he says.

 

The Drift is…

Nothing like the technical details. Nothing that he could anticipate.

He connects with Emily, and Emily connects with him, and it's as instinctual as drawing a breath.

**∞**

It's fitting, Emily thinks, that Nolan is standing beside her at the end. After all, he started her on this path when he delivered that box to her. Emily stares at Grayson manor, darkened and empty; abruptly, the future becomes a real, tangible thing.

"What now?" she says, more to herself than to Nolan. Even with Aiden and their plan to run away, she hadn't imagined the future. It was too distant, too abstract, to picture. "Maybe I should –" She turns to face the ocean, but Nolan's hand is on hers.

"Don't tell me you're leaving. Not after all of this."

"And what will I do, Nolan? Live a normal life? Live _their_ life?"

"Of course not," he says, "Normal is boring. But you owe it to yourself to try something in the neighborhood of normal. You have people here. Jack, Charlotte, Carl."

"I don't know." The ocean surges, huge waves cascading along the shore, and it's hard to fight. Hard to not let the tide carry her away.

"Stay," he pleads, "and find out. You don't want to spend your life wondering what you're missing."

 

She stays, lets herself fall in love with Jack Porter again. A year passes, twelve months of maybes and hopes, and finally, trusting each other. A year of waking up beside Jack, of teaching Carl all the games she used to play with her father, of breakfasts and dinners and fevers and nightmares.

And Nolan was right: this glimpse of normality, this taste of building rather than tearing down, is something she's craved. Seeing Carl grow, offering olive branches to Charlotte, and discovering she doesn't have to follow the tide.

Nolan leaves a few months in, off to conquer Europe. He tells her that he's too much of a reminder of her father, that she won't move on without him there. But when he leaves, the ghosts don't go with him.

Some days, Carl looks so much like Amanda, it's impossible to forget. And even on her best days with Jack, Emily knows something is missing. They never fully fall in sync, however close they get, and there are things he'll never understand. Things that make her who she is.

One day, she wakes from a nap to a conversation she's not meant to hear. "Don't leave," Jack begs Charlotte.

"You don't need me," she tells him. "I'm not Carl's aunt, not really, and Emily takes care of him most days –"

"Charlotte," Jack says, low and pleading. There's a pause, a shuffling silence, and Emily can picture him putting his arm around her sister. "You're family. Stay, please?"

 

Emily packs her bags a week later. "I'm going to visit Nolan," she explains. "I haven't heard from him in a while."

But Jack knows, just like she does, that she's not coming back. "It was always you two, anyway," Jack says.

 

She finds him in Zurich, crushing smaller tech companies beneath a rebuilt NolCorp's heel. She schedules an appointment with his secretary under a pseudonym. _Old habits_ , she thinks, staring down at Zurich from her hotel window. But then, she doubts it's a coincidence that Nolan has hidden himself in the same city that he hid David Clarke's money.

The following morning, he greets her at his office door. His polite smile falters when he sees her. "Miss Monaghan," he says, shaking her hand, "a pleasure."

His secretary closes the door behind him, eyeing them suspiciously, and Nolan's businesslike demeanor drops entirely. He takes a single step toward her, then stops abruptly as though hitting a wall. All these years, and he takes only what she offers. "Emily."

"Nolan," she replies, moving toward him. It's hitting her, all the things Nolan gets, how well he's learned her. She hugs him, not realizing how much she needed to.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

"I could ask the same," Emily counters. "You gave me that speech last year about sticking around, then you left."

"You weren't staying for me, so I thought…" Nolan says. It's perhaps the most vulnerable thing he's said to her in years, and suddenly, Emily understands that every time he asked her to stay, it was for his sake. Not Jack's or Charlotte's.

"I'm sorry," she says, "I didn't know. I never seem to know how much people care unless –"

"– unless you orchestrated it?" Nolan supplies. "Ems, you've been everything."

 

It happens much like it always has with Nolan: Their lives intertwine, they fall into their give-and-take, and he becomes a greater part of her. Then one evening, she realizes how much he means to her. 

Before, discovering how much she needs Nolan has come at a cost; this time, they're sitting across from each other at his kitchen peninsula.

She's flipping through tabloids, looking for victims beneath the paparazzi shots and outlandish stories, and he's reading. He does that more, she's noticed, stepping away from his computer and combing through the books that came with his house.

Each night, it's a different book, and Emily doesn't pay much attention to the titles. But tonight, she catches a glimpse and – "Nietzsche?" she asks. "Really?"

He shrugs. "Why not?"

"Just the whole – eternal return, reincarnation? Living the same life over and over. It sounds like a nightmare."

"Maybe," he agrees. "But I don't know. Some things are worth reliving, I think."

"Like what?"

"This," he says, simply. "You."

As far as confessions go, Emily once might have said it isn't much. But that's Nolan. Beneath his garish fashion sense beats an understated heart. As he turns the page, she thinks she could live it all again, if she had Nolan there with her.

 

"Why did you come here?" Nolan asks her one night.

"I didn't want to spend my life wondering," she answers.

 

She kisses him for the first time as he's leaving for Paris. This trip, his first since she arrived in Zurich, will take him away for three weeks. "You were right," she says, after. "About Nietzsche."

He laughs. His luggage is scattered at their feet, forgotten in his haste to pull her close. "Be here when I come back?"

"I will," she promises. The pull of the ocean has waned.


End file.
